In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive—individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another—some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive. In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama. A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.

Song offers a vital case study for examining the rich interplay of music, gender, and representation in the early modern period. This collection engages with the question of how gender informed song within particular textual, social, and spatial contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Bringing together ongoing work in musicology, literary studies, and film studies, it elaborates an interdisciplinary consideration of the embodied and gendered facets of song, and of song’s capacity to function as a powerful-and flexible-gendered signifier. The essays in this collection draw vivid attention to song as a situated textual and musical practice, and to the gendered processes and spaces of song's circulation and reception. In so doing, they interrogate the literary and cultural significance of song for early modern readers, performers, and audiences.

The relation between procreation and authorship, between reproduction and publication, has a long history - indeed, that relationship may well be the very foundation of history itself. The essays in this volume bring into focus a remarkably important and complex phase of this long history. In this volume, some of the most renowned scholars in the field persuasively demonstrate that during the early modern period, the awkward, incomplete transition from manuscript to print brought on by the invention of the printing press temporarily exposed and disturbed the epistemic foundations of English culture. As a result of this cultural upheaval, the discursive field of parenting was profoundly transformed. Through an examination of the literature of the period, this volume illuminates how many important conceptual systems related to gender, sexuality, human reproduction, legitimacy, maternity, kinship, paternity, dynasty, inheritance, and patriarchal authority came to be grounded in a range of anxieties and concerns directly linked to an emergent publishing industry and book trade. In exploring a wide spectrum of historical and cultural artifacts produced during the convergence of human and mechanical reproduction, of parenting and printing, these essays necessarily bring together two of the most vital critical paradigms available to scholars today: gender studies and the history of the book. Not only does this rare interdisciplinary coupling generate fresh and exciting insights into the literary and cultural production of the early modern period but it also greatly enriches the two critical paradigms themselves.

Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'songscape', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque or a play, however, the tendency is to engage with it as poem rather than as musical performance. Opening up the notion of song from a performance-based perspective, The Matter of Song in Early Modern England considers the implications of reading song not simply as lyric text but as an embodied and gendered musical practice. Animating the traces of song preserved in physiological and philosophical commentaries, singing handbooks, poetic treatises, and literary texts ranging from Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalmes to John Milton's Comus, the book confronts song's ephemerality, its lexical and sonic capriciousness, and its airy substance. These features can resist critical analysis but were vital to song's affective workings in the early modern period. The volume foregrounds the need to attend much more closely to the embodied and musical dimensions of literary production and circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It also makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of women's engagement with song as writers and as performers. A companion recording of fourteen songs featuring Larson (soprano) and Lucas Harris (lute) brings the project's innovative methodology and central case studies to life.

Printed Musical Propaganda in Early Modern England reveals how consistently music, in theory and practice, was used as propaganda in a variety of printed genres that included or discussed music from the English Civil Wars through the reign of William and Mary. These printed items—bawdy broadside ballads, pamphlets paid for by Parliament, sermons advertising the Church of England’s love of music, catch-all music collections, music treatises addressed to monarchs, and masque and opera texts—when connected in a contextual mosaic, reveal a new picture of not just individual propaganda pieces, but multi-work propaganda campaigns with contributions that cross social boundaries. Musicians, Royalists, Parliamentarians, government officials, propagandists, clergymen, academics, and music printers worked together setting musical traps to catch the hearts and minds of their audiences and readers. Printed Musical Propaganda proves that the influential power of music was not merely an academic matter for the early modern English, but rather a practical benefit that many sought to exploit for their own gain.

Comprehensive, lavishly illustrated survey of English popular music during the early modern period. Accompanied by specially commissioned recordings.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on--and challenges--the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

In this volume, a new generation of researchers explore and demonstrate the interaction between politics and violence in the context of Greek and European history. In terms of focus, the articles here extend over a time span stretching from the Greek classical period to the twentieth century. The ancient Greek polis, medieval and early modern Europe, Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth-century Britain and the Greek society of the 1940s are some of the historical periods in which the relationship between violence and politics is examined. At the same time, the authors tackle important themes concerning this relationship, such as legitimate and illegitimate violence, violence from above and from below, resistance and revolt, authority and subordination, and gendered and political violence.

Clark explores how real-life women's crimes were handled in the news media of an age before the invention of the newspaper, in ballads, pamphlets, and plays. It discusses those features of contemporary society which particularly influenced early modern crime reporting, such as attitudes to news, the law and women's rights, and ideas about the responsibility of the community for keeping order. It considers the problems of writing about transgressive women for audiences whose ideal woman was chaste, silent, and obedient.

Singing together is a tried and true method of establishing and maintaining a group’s identity. Identity, Intertextuality, and Performance in Early Modern Song Culture for the first time explores comparatively the dynamic process of group formation through the production and appropriation of songs in various European countries and regions. Drawing on oral, handwritten and printed sources, with examples ranging from 1450 to 1850, the authors investigate intertextual patterns, borrowing of melodies, and performance practices as these manifested themselves in a broad spectrum of genres including ballads, popular songs, hymns and political songs. The volume intends to be a point of departure for further comparative studies in European song culture. Contributors are: Ingrid Åkesson, Mary-Ann Constantine, Patricia Fumerton, Louis Peter Grijp, Éva Guillorel, Franz-Josef Holznagel, Tine de Koninck, Christopher Marsh, Hubert Meeus, Nelleke Moser, Dieuwke van der Poel, Sophie Reinders, David Robb, Clara Strijbosch, and Anne Marieke van der Wal.